Today, digital systems are used to represent and process virtually all types of media in commercial, entertainment, educational and other fields. For example, visual media such as photographs, movies, video and animations are largely handled in the digital domain. Similarly, audio media such as speech, music, sound effects, etc., are also recorded, edited, produced, copied and transferred in the digital domain.
The production systems used to produce and manipulate digital media perform many other functions such as adding content and auxiliary information to the media, transferring portions of the media for review and approval, storing and indexing the media, etc. There are many possible operations on even a small media portion, such as on one of thousands of frames in a movie. These operations are often repeated many times by trial-and-error, and then extrapolated to larger segments of the production. There may be many hundreds or thousands of operations performed over weeks of creation. This is further compounded when many people are involved in creating, reviewing, or approving the production at steps along the way. Often, some of the people involved in the production are not technically inclined and, yet, must work in the highly technical and specialized environment provided by a sophisticated production system. To make the situation even more difficult, the production team members may be located in geographically remote places thus making communication and collaboration extremely difficult.
Thus, it is desirable to provide production system features to improve upon one or more shortcomings in the prior art.
The invention provides a user interface to annotate different items in a media production system such as in a digital non-linear post production system. Parts of the production, such as clips, frames and layers, that have an associated annotation are provided with a visual annotation marker. The annotation marker can use shape, color or animation to convey source, urgency, status or other information. Annotations can be text, freehand drawing, audio, or other. Annotations can be automatically generated. Annotations can be compiled into records, searched and transferred. A state of an application program can be stored and transferred to a remote system. The remote system attempts to recreate the original state of the application program. If the remote system is unable to do so, an image of the state of the application program is obtained, instead. Assignment of control to various functions of an application program is achieved by associating a function (i.e., modifying a parameter) with a user control at a remote location.
In one embodiment the invention provides a method for annotating an item in a user interface of a media production system. The method includes accepting signals from a user input device to select a part of a production being processed by the media production system; creating annotation information; and storing the annotation information in association with the selected part of the production.
In another embodiment the invention provides a method for conveying the state of an application program to a remote location. The method includes determining to capture the current state of operation of the application program; saving one or more settings of a current environment of the application program as a recorded environment; and transferring the recorded environment to a remote location.
In another embodiment the invention provides a method for recreating the state of an application program at a process executing at a location remote from the application program, wherein a recorded environment includes settings for recreating the state of the application program. The method including receiving, over a digital network, the recorded environment; executing another instance of the application program at the location remote from the application program; and using the instance and the recorded environment to recreate the state of the application program at the location remote from the application program.